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Let me give you some brain pickings!

This is from Brain Pickings and it is Noam Chomsky on the importance of having a framework when using information technology.

On the importance of having a framework for what matters when engaging with the the information economy – or, one might say, the essence of what great curation should be:

You can’t pursue any kind of inquiry without a relatively clear framework that’s directing your search and helping you choose what’s significant and what isn’t… If you don’t have some sort of a framework for what matters – always, of course, with the provisor that you’re willing to question it if it seems to be going in the wrong direction – if you don’t have that, exploring the Internet is just picking out the random factoids that don’t mean anything… You have to know how to evaluate, interpret, and understand… The person who wins the Nobel Prize is not the person who read the most journal articles and took the most notes on them. It’s the person who knew what to look for. And cultivating that capacity to seek what’s significant, always willing to question whether you’re on the right track – that’s what education is going to be about, whether it’s using computers and the Internet, or pencil and paper, or books.”

ᔥ Noam Chomsky, ↬BrainPickings.org

You should click on the ‘great curation’ link to see how you can attribute your quotes etc from the internet. At the moment people generally just say where the information is from but now there are two symbols which you can use. The Curators Code. As a librarian I can remember the time it took to teach students how to cite references in the Harvard Method . . . then someone came up with a computer program where the students just needed to insert the appropriate information and the citing was produced for them. Now, using the internet you just need a symbol! How the world keeps changing. This is so much easier to do.

3 thoughts on “Let me give you some brain pickings!”

We are elementary school educators on the journey to not only guide our students to critically navigate the depths of virtual information, but also seek to find gems for our own use. Thank you for directing us towards an effective framework for information consumption. How are we doing with this on our own blog?